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11.18pm BST
Chief medical officer Paul Kelly:
So in terms of aged care, which is our absolutely most vulnerable group in Australia, I’m absolutely comfortable about the rollout through the aged care sector for patients.
They’re the ones who are vulnerable. This week we’ll have completed, absolutely completed, the second dose visits to every single aged care facility in the country.
That’s for residents.
We’ll have 100% coverage for residents.
Which was supposed to happen months ago.
Yeah, well, let’s move forward and start with celebrating this week we’ll have completed that task. The aged care workforce is another layer of protection around that vulnerable group.
And we’ve seen in Melbourne with the recent outbreak, there were a number of aged care facilities that were either affected our potentially affected through primary close contacts. We had three residents were sick. None of them died. Two of them are back at home, I believe the other one still may be in hospital and recovering. That’s a very different situation to what we found last year and there’s with a variant of interest, the kappa variant.
11.15pm BST
Kelly has been asked on ABC news breakfast why the federal deadline for aged care and quarantine workers to receive their first vaccine dose is all the way into September, and if this was a reflection of just how far behind the country is when it comes to the vaccination rollout.
Kelly:
So, the prime minister explained that last night at the press conference that – and I think this is the crucial point – mandating something like vaccination is not a decision to be taken lightly.
You need to weigh up all the issues that are involved to make sure we have used other ways of getting the vaccine out, making sure that access is clear, make sure there’s no barriers to that.